A View of the World Lost in Wonder, Love and Praise" (well, most of the time)

Wednesday, June 01, 2016

Belonging: The Letter to the Galatians

Sermon preached at St. Michael's Church, Geneseo, New York on the 2nd Sunday after Pentecost, May 29, 2016. Proper 4C: Galatians 1:1-12

A new parishioner came
to see me once. I was eager to talk with her. She had come to service a few
times, but I could tell she had a certain wariness. She told me her story,
which included this incident. In the late 1980’s she started taking her
pre-school age children to one of the local Protestant churches. It was
nominally her family church, although she had attended very little growing up.
Nevertheless, she wanted to give them a faith experience.

As is typical in a small
church, she soon found herself teaching Sunday School. She surprised herself by
enjoying it. About a year and a half later her marriage began to disintegrate
and she left her husband, which in her case she believed was the right and even
responsible thing to do.

She also did the
responsible thing and made an appointment to see the pastor to let him know
what was happening and why. She did not even get in the door of the parsonage.
Through the screen door the pastor let her know that he already knew what had happened.
He was sorry for it, but if she was going through with the divorce she was no
longer able to teach Sunday School. She turned and walked off the porch and has
never attended another church regularly.

The Letter to the
Galatians is, I think, the most fascinating of all the New Testament writings.
There are other major contenders for this honor, but I choose Galatians because
I think it has never lost its obvious relevance to the present day.

Paul begins his letter
to the Galatians in his usual way, with a greeting in which he names the
parties who are to receive the letter, and he and his companions who are
sending it. In every other letter Paul writes, he then goes into a second
section giving thanks and blessings for the church to whom he is writing.

But not Galatians.
Having greeted them, he gets right down to business.

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting
the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different
gospel—not that there is another gospel, but there are some who are confusing
you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ…let them be accursed and let me
say it again, let them be accursed.

Later on in the letter
he will call the Galatians “foolish” and “bewitched” (3:1) and he will say that
he wishes those who were confusing them would castrate themselves (5:12). He is
not happy, and more than that, he clearly sees what is going on as a crisis.

So what was going on? I
would say it was about belonging. How do you set the boundaries so that you
know who may legitimately call themselves Christian and who may not?

Paul’s opponents
fervently believed that following Christ involved following the Jewish law as
he had done. First and foremost this meant the requirement of male circumcision
as prescribed by the Law, going all the way back to the patriarch Abraham. Male
circumcision was a distinctly Jewish mark of belonging, unknown (and even
outlawed) in Greek and Roman culture where Christianity was spreading.

Paul makes clear in his
letter, however, that this crisis is not simply over circumcision. It is about
the very nature of the gospel. His bottom-line goes something like this:

You can be sure you are saved if you
follow the Law as laid out in the Torah. In other words, your behavior saves
you.

This way of thinking was
what Paul called a “different gospel,” although he goes on to point out that it
is actually no gospel at all. There is no “good news” in having to follow a law
that no one can possibly follow.

Instead, the Gospel Paul
proclaims is this:

I have been crucified with Christ; and
it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I
live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave
himself for me. (2:19b-20)

In other words, we are
saved not by any work of ours, but by Christ’s work of sacrificial love. I do
not know I am right with God by the things I do, but by the thing Christ did,
which was ultimately not an act of judgment, but of love.

Paul goes on to make
clear what the consequences are of these two different ways of believing:

If you believe you are saved by following the law, then you can belong
only when you do so. Break the law and you are out. For those proclaiming this
“different gospel” it made sense that you could be a descendent of Abraham only
by doing what Abraham did.

But that is not the Gospel. The Gospel, Paul said, is that you are a
descendant of Abraham if you have the faith Abraham had, that is, if you depend
on God for your salvation, not your own good behavior.

And if that was true,
then the circle of the followers of Abraham was one that only got wider and
wider, so he will make what was then the most astonishing statement that

Having faith means we do not live under
the thumb of judgment. You are all children of God through faith. In baptism
(which was not a work, but a statement of faith) the seemingly natural
separations that exist among us do not exist anymore—there is no longer Jew or
Gentile, no longer slave or free, no longer male and female.

God is not the great accountant in the sky, keeping
track of sins so that he can determine who is in and who is out. No, God is not
in the accounting business, he is in the adoption business.

Live in freedom, Paul
says, not fear. But remember that all God’s adopted children are free, and the
only way that can work is if you live by this single commandment: “love your
neighbor as yourself.” If you do not work at loving one another you will be overcome
by conceit, competition and envy and you will end up back where you started.

This debate about
whether right behavior or right love is what saves us and calls us together in
community has gone on in the church ever since. In many ways the issue has
never been settled.

In one last attempt to
make it as simple as possible, it is the difference between being loved because
our behavior has earned it, or being loving because we were loved first. To put
it in the language of belonging, it is the difference between belonging because
our behavior has earned it, or belonging because God recognizes us first as
brothers and sisters of Jesus.

It is obvious by now
that I believe my parishioner’s story is an example of how the church clings to
the behavior-earning belonging model. Unfortunately, her story is not an
aberration. I could tell you stories like hers all day long. And many of you
could as well. No church—whether denomination or individual congregation—is
free from this struggle.

It is the most natural
thing in the world to want to draw a circle around ourselves with clear
behavioral boundaries. In his letter to
the Romans, Paul will actually use the word “unnatural” to describe the boundary-crossing
life we are called to live as a church (Romans 11:24). It does seem something
like unnatural to say that no one earns their way into the church, but it is
the truth and we must proclaim it, and, even harder, practice it.

Holy living is first and
foremost holy loving or it is meaningless, a “different gospel” that is no
gospel at all.